Foucauldian Categories. The core categories I ground in this thesis must be credited to a broad tradition of thought mostly associated with, but not limited to, philosophers and writers such as Xxxxxxx (1973), Deleuze (1968), Xxxxxxxxx (1971) and Xxxxxxxx (1972). Nonetheless, I will describe these ideas mainly through Xxxxxxxx’x work. The question of how to define the discursive, or discursive practices is central the deployment of Foucauldian categories. Some define discursive practice as mainly relating to issues of language use and meaning, or as Hall (2001:72) describes it: ‘passages of connected writing or speech’. Xxxxxxxx’x concept of discourse offers a broader understanding of what can be thought of as being discursive (see Xxxxxxxx 1972; 1977; 1980). According to Xxxxxxxx (1972), discourse represents systems of knowledge and beliefs, historically, socially, culturally and institutionally situated, which produce collective ways of talking, perceiving and thinking about ourselves, others and things. Xxxxxxxx (1972: 49) moves away from treating discourses ‘as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations)’ and argues we must see them as social practices that ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’. Hence, discourses offer us frameworks of language to think, understand and speak about the world, while also limiting what we can say about it. For Xxxxxxxx (1972), there is no self before discourse and we cannot think, speak, act or ‘be’ outside of discourse. The self and the world are both produced within discourse. Xxxxxxxx’x concept of discourse builds on a notion of power as productive, as they contribute to producing the subjects we are, and the objects we can know something about (including ourselves as subjects) (Xxxxxxxx 1978). Moreover, discourses build on discursive formations of ‘truth’, which is why the discourses formed within medical and social sciences are so central to what is constituted as knowledge (see e.g., Xxxxxxxx 1977; 1980). Common understandings of how things are tend to become unified and stabilised through certain scientific ‘truths’ that become naturalised and accepted as common sense. Hence, when studying policy problems and problem representations, these questions incite us to think more about how we think (Lather 1989), to examine how ‘truths’ are made, and to not take ‘everything that passes for knowledge’ for granted (Xxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx 1967: 14). Power, then, is conceived as discursive, in that dis...
